Obama and McCain battle in key states won by Bush

According to the NYT, Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama are planning to spend most the last week leading to the presidential election in states that President Bush won in 2004, “testimony to the increasingly dire position of Mr. McCain and his party as Election Day approaches.”

In the home stretch, Barack Obama is deploying his vastly superior financial clout and organization in a bid to carry formerly pro-Republican states. John McCain is being forced to defend states like Indiana and North Carolina that were considered safe for him a few months back. He campaigned on Sunday in Iowa, a day after Governor Sarah Palin, but polls showed that Barack Obama was comfortably ahead there.

John McCain has devoted much time to Pennsylvania, which the Democrats won in 2004 but where Hillary Clinton trounced Obama in the primary, hoping that Clinton’s white supporters would cross party lines to vote for him. Now he and his running mate are planning to spend most of their remaining time in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana, states that Republicans earlier had considered safe.

The one Democratic-leaning state Obama is planning to visit is Pennsylvania, to counter McCain’s faith that he could win there. After clear signs that Florida was up for grabs, Obama is making a vigorous push in that state, thereby opening a new front against his opponent. In the words of Washington Post’s Op Ed columnist E. J. Dionne, "The fact that McCain is on the defensive here and in such a broad swath of Republican territory is emblematic of the 2008 endgame. It is a sign of the extent to which Obama has out-organized and out-strategized McCain, and it's an indication of how almost all the issues have moved against the G.O.P."

The race in two states that had once appeared overwhelmingly Republican, Georgia and South Carolina, was also tightening, thanks to a surge of early-voting by African-Americans, although McCain is still expected to carry these states.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, McCain is attracting far smaller crowds than Obama — even in battleground states.

With growing optimism in the Democratic ranks, Senator Obama is expected to deliver on Monday his summing-up speech for his campaign in Canton, Ohio. Thereafter, as a front-runner, Obama may temper his attacks on McCain with an emphasis on broader and less partisan themes, like the need to unify the country in the face of a disastrous financial crisis.

Mr. McCain will continue presenting his opponent as an advocate of big government and raising taxes, and inexperienced. He will hammer the line that he favors spreading the wealth as opposed to raising taxes.

Sadly for Republicans, in the face of adversity, the McCain-Palin campaign has become mired by infighting and public recrimination between the staffs of the presidential and vice presidential candidates, a clear sign of an ebbing cause.

While some Republicans are putting up a brave front that McCain could somehow win, a la Harry Truman, others, like the former Republican house speaker Newt Gingrich, have expressed concern that the party may be heading for a big defeat that could weaken it for years.

In an earlier report dated October 20, this column had suggested that Barack ObamaBarack Obama could win the election comfortably with 306 electoral votes, but Washington Post’s politics blog by Chris Cillizza updated to October 27 predicts an Obama landslide of at least 349 votes. He goes even further by raising the possibility that if Indiana and North Carolina were to vote for Obama, the score could go up to 375 votes. But Indiana is unlikely to go to Obama because McCain has a six point lead over him, according to Reuters.

True, Senator Obama appears to have generated almost irresistible momentum in favor of his candidature. If only one could be sure that the issue of race had been set aside, an Obama sweep would be a certainty. But one cannot rely 100 percent on polls because some people just might be hiding their true intentions from the pollsters. Even if that is the case, however, Senator Obama has created a sufficient security cushion for himself to ensure that worst comes to the worst, he could still win the election with a comfortable majority of electoral votes.